SSJ is waiting for a signal – Newspaper Kommersant No. 39 (7484) of 03/09/2023

The Federal Air Transport Agency asked airlines to evaluate the quality of emergency signaling on SSJ-100 aircraft and how clearly the instructions describe the recommended actions for pilots. The reason, according to Kommersant, was the mutual claims of the Irkut aircraft manufacturer and its largest operator, Rossiya Airlines, in the investigation of the blocking of the SSJ flaps during the Moscow-Petersburg flight in September 2022. Kommersant’s sources in the aviation industry believe that the crew is to blame: the pilots should have abandoned the flight. The pilots say the ban has not been put in place, noting that “flap issues” are an “old childhood disease” of the SSJ that Western technology does not have.

As it became known to Kommersant, Rosaviatsiya is interviewing SSJ-100 operators about how pilots understand the emergency signaling, and asks them to evaluate the actions of the Rossiya airline crew. In a letter to carriers in early February, the regulator said that it was completing an investigation into the incident that occurred on September 12, 2022 with the Rossiya SSJ-100, when after takeoff from Vnukovo, the flaps blocked at the liner during the cleaning of the wing mechanization. The commander decided to continue the flight and safely landed the plane in Pulkovo. The flaps remained in the takeoff configuration.

During the investigation, it turned out that even while taxiing, the “warning message” “F / CTL SLATS LO SPEED” appeared on the display (about slowing down the speed of the flaps). “The PIC, considering this message to be informational, not requiring any action and not imposing restrictions, continued taxiing and took off,” the letter from the Federal Air Transport Agency says (Kommersant has it). The failed unit was sent for research to the Aviation Register of the Russian Federation.

The Federal Air Transport Agency asked the airlines to anonymously tell how clear and easy to understand the information about warnings is recorded in the SSJ flight documentation and whether it requires clarification. Pilots are also asked to explain how they respond to white, yellow and red level messages.

The Federal Air Transport Agency, Rossiya and the developer of the aircraft, the Irkut Corporation, declined to comment until the end of the investigation. At the same time, according to a Kommersant source familiar with the investigation, Rosaviatsiya sent questions after “a controversy arose between the manufacturer and the operator” about the correct sequence of actions of the crew and the reasons for blocking.

According to one of Kommersant’s sources, the manufacturer believes that “the crew made deviations from the requirements of the RLE (flight operation manual)”, since they decided to continue flying when a signal was triggered to slow down the flaps on the ground.

Five SSJ pilots interviewed by Kommersant of different airlines noted that the collection of operational information (Quick Reference Handbook, QRH – a document for use in the cockpit) defines such a command as an information message of the “white” level, which does not contain a ban on continuing the flight. The QRH only says to take into account the reduction in the speed of the flaps, says the SSJ pilot instructor. The document now allows “pilots to behave in two ways: they can either abandon a flight in preparation for takeoff and continue it,” he says. In his opinion, the manufacturer should formulate more precise instructions. According to other pilots, there is no need for a take-off ban: on average, it takes 30 seconds to clean the mechanization. The slowdown, Kommersant’s interlocutors clarify, is not critical and only requires compliance with the aircraft’s speed limits established under such a scenario: “At high, the mechanization of the wing can come off, at low, the nose “bulls up”, and the plane can collapse.

With the flaps locked, the QRH collector does not require an emergency landing or return to the airport of departure. In flight, extended flaps limit the aircraft in altitude and speed, which increases fuel consumption, and when making a decision, the PIC must calculate whether he has enough fuel to reach the destination airfield. You also need to consider whether the length of the runway is enough, including at alternate airfields, since landing speed will be higher with flaps not extended. In rain or snow, the strip should be at least 2 km, Kommersant’s interlocutors say.

Four out of five SSJ pilots said that over the years of the raid, they repeatedly encountered one or another option for blocking the mechanization of the wing. The defect is considered serious, but not critical. One pilot referred to the flap problem as “a long-resolved Superjet childhood affliction” but repeatedly observed the signal to slow down the flaps. Five Boeing and Airbus pilots, in an interview with Kommersant, assured that they had never seen such failures on these aircraft. One of them sees the reason for the fact that Superjets have electric flaps, while Western aircraft have hydraulic flaps.

Problems with flaps on foreign vehicles are extremely rare, confirms Aeroflot pilot, A320 commander Andrey Litvinov, in whose practice there were no such cases. He also agreed that blocking on both sides of the wing is a controlled situation that “can become dangerous only with an asymmetric failure on one side of the wing, when the ship can go into blockage.” According to all the pilots interviewed by Kommersant, wing mechanization failures are regularly practiced in simulators.

Aigul Abdullina